"Grandpa, grandpa! Oh, what has happened to grandpa?" she cried.
The Bishop's head had dropped into his breast and he had fainted. When he opened his eyes in consciousness Mona was bathing his forehead and damping his lips.
"My child," he said, nervously, "one has come back to us from the dead."
And Mona answered him with the thought that was now uppermost in her mind:
"Dear uncle," she said, "my poor father died half an hour ago."
CHAPTER XLV
"OUR FATHER, WHICH ART IN HEAVEN"
Not many days after the events recorded in the foregoing chapter the people of Man awoke to the joyful certainty that the sweating sickness had disappeared. The solid wave of heat had gone; the ground had become dry and the soil light; and no fetid vapors floated over the Curraghs at midday. Also the air had grown keener, the nights had sharpened, and in the morning the fronds of hoar-frost hung on the withering leaves of the trammon.
Then the poor folk began to arrange their thoughts concerning the strange things that had happened; to count up their losses by death; to talk of children that were fatherless, and of old men left alone in the world, like naked trunks, without bough or branch, flung on the bare earth by yesterday's storm.